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Monthly Archives: August 2011

One of the things we know very little about is the requester. Who are they? What do they want? And what do they do with the information? The general pattern seems to be that the public is the biggest user, followed by small groups of journalists and activists. At certain levels, and in certain countries, particularly the USA and Canada, business is also a big requester.

A recent report from the EU commission on use of its own access legislation has shown some interesting variation against this general pattern (though it needs to be remembered that total requests in 2010 were only 6127 compared with 5055 in 2009).

The biggest users of EU access legislation are academics (23%), followed by other public authorities (13%) and lawyers (10%). It’s quite possible that the deadlines on returning the information mean that only researchers with time to spare (e.g. academics, lawyers) use it, rather than those with very strict deadlines such as journalists (3%). Other EU institutions make up 8 % of requesters-is that indicative of information sharing problems?

Another interesting question, given the size of the EU, is which countries they are coming from. Belgium is top, accounting for 17 % of all requests, Germany is second on 16 %,France on 9 % and Italy on 8 %. The UK is fifth on 7 %. Many of the newer accession countries, with the exception of the Czech Republic and Poland, make much less use of it.

So what is being asked for? FOI often targets particular areas. Traditionally these are either affairs of importance to a particular person (so for example, Veteran’s Affairs or Social Security are big topics) or areas of general interest such as finance. The Secretariat General is the primary focus of 11% of all requests with Competition second on 9 %. Justice is high up, third place on 8%; as is often the case, but both finance and trade (2%) and agriculture (3%) seem remarkably low on the list.

So why this difference from normal patterns? It may be that EU documents are of interest to particular groups. It may also be simply matter of publicity-few know it exists. There are also clearly difficulties over access and responsiveness, something Access Info Europe was very critical of earlier this year. Things may get more interesting with the arrival of the new website that helps people to make requests ‘Ask the EU’ later this year.

The last time Prince Charles came under the spotlight for getting too close to Parliament, the news was we could get none. This month, the Guardian found a way around that.

The Royal Family’s communications with ministers became exempt under the Freedom of Information Act during the final days of the previous government, making it difficult for anyone to find out whether Prince Charles was stepping over his constitutional boundaries when meeting with ministers.

The Guardian obtained 17 emails and letters between five of the prince’s charities and ministers and officials in four government departments and found evidence of what a few months ago were just a series of (arguably well founded) suspicions.

“urged business secretary, Vince Cable, to rethink a decision to scrap the Northwest Regional Development Agency. The Prince’s Foundation for a Built Environment urged the local government minister, Grant Shapps, ‘to incorporate greater community engagement in planning and promoted its own planning work around the country as something for him to consider in the ‘national planning framework’.”

Urging may have also meant persuading. The Department for Communities and Local Government awarded a £800,000 grant to the Prince’s Foundation “to advise local groups on new developments.”

The Department denies any connection between Charles’ lobbying and the grant, but Paul Richards, special adviser to former secretaries of state for communities and health recalls how the prince’s letters seemed to sail smoothly into ministers’ hands.

“There was a frisson of excitement when a letter came in from Charles and there was easy, open-door access for his office and charities in a way I felt other organisations would struggle to match. My sense was that the charities were given a star status and that means they get priority and I would be astonished if that was any different under the current government.”

A letter from Charles’ office to the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, about planning issues in the city, is being withheld because disclosure could harm the prince’s “political neutrality.”

The Guardian obtained the correspondence between ministers and Prince Charles’ charities through the government – if it had attempted to obtain the information through his charities, they would have hit another obstacle: they are not covered by the Act and won’t be anytime soon.

The majority of charities are not subject to FOI (the ones that are, are listed under Schedule 1 of the Act). The scope of FOI will be extended to more organisations by the end of next year under the Protection of Freedoms Bill, but it’s uncertain whether the Princes’ charities will be considered therein.

The government’s transparency revolution continues with the recent announcement of a consultation on next steps. One of its flagship policies has been the publication of all local authority spending over £500 which will allow us all to become ‘armchair auditors’ to hold our local authorities to account and hunt out waste. So how it is working?

Up until now, the effect seems to be uneven. Some authorities we have spoken to have had little interest from anyone. They think the public are simply not interested in the raw data. Others have reported an initial spike in interest from the local media which then dropped off when ‘nothing interesting’ was revealed.

Local authorities elsewhere have had much heaver use by the opposition, local journalists and, increasingly, trade unions. The regional media have highlighted odd spending, from string quartets in Kent to a particularly large hot pot in Manchester. Other officials feel the benefits are internal, as members and officials better understand their own budgets, previously a mystery to everyone except accountants. It doesn’t appear to have led to more FOI requests as some officers feared.

There are, as the government admitted in its new consultation, a number of problems. Poor data quality and inconsistency makes it difficult for the data to be used or re-used. Some authorities IT systems simply aren’t designed to put out information in the way the government want. Officials are also worried that, in tough times, the low level of the £500 threshold will feed existing prejudices that local government is ‘wasteful’. At least, some have argued, the audit regulations give plenty of context rather than isolated facts.

There has been little sign yet of the ‘army of armchair auditors’ the government hopes will comb through the data. We would expect to see lots of newspaper stories of residents or groups taking on their authorities and holding their leaders to account with this information. A few recently made a splash in Barnett. Mr Pickles himself has carried the war to the enemy, using FOI against the one council that has refused to publish its spending. There are a few websites with names such as ‘armchair auditor’ or ‘reluctant armchair auditor’, but they have not yet spread and the reluctant auditor complained in the Guardian that the data lacked the quality and context to be useful. Overall, we haven’t yet seen a groundswell of ‘active’ citizens questioning and probing their local authorities.

So will it improve? The government is determined to push on and create a new right to data, make information ‘open by default’ and encourage new innovation. They have recognised some of the difficulties and suggested that all new IT systems be designed for ease of publication, and committed to creating a new set of ‘standards’ to ensure consistency and a new right to data.

One key area to keep an eye on are the new sites, such as Openly Local, which allow information to be compared and analysed easily and quickly in all sorts of ways. The rapidly growing number of hyper local sites may also start using the data. It may be here, following the example of the local’ and ‘street-level’ experiments in the US, that some of the really interesting number crunching will happen.

This is a longer version of an article published in the Local Government Chronicle

One of the things we found out about FOI is that it never settles down. Although it becomes part and parcel of operations it always has the potential to highlight new issues or kick up a fuss-it can liberate, muck-rake or simply cause a headache. Just to show you, I wanted to look at some of the interesting developments around our town and city halls over the past few weeks.

There has been some old fashioned digging using FOI that sheds some new light on topical events and liberates all sorts of information. One activist has opened up councils investment of pension funds in the tobacco industry. Others have highlighted authorities’ lack of defence against cyber intrusion and lack of registered managers at care homes.

There has been a nice symmetry of ‘political’ requests involving unions. The GMB trade union used FOI to find out about how many staff are choosing to opt out of pensions. The Conservatives, at the same time, have been busy calculating how much tax payers have spent ‘keeping’ Union representatives in local authorities. We can expect to see many more of these.

It isn’t just the subjects that FOI exposes. FOI and openness can itself cause controversy and headaches for politicians. In Liverpool there was alleged manipulation of requests to a journalist. At Kirklees council the ongoing controversy around a council leader allegedly interfering in responses is now subject of an internal investigation. Birmingham council has decided to that its first debate on the riots will be held in secret to avoid ‘grandstanding’. One disgruntled councillor in Scotland linked FOI to phone hacking, expressing the concern that the lack of illegal methods of accessing information will lead to more requests. The Computer weekly has alleged that a computer company has ‘gagged’ Bristol City council and refused to allow it to publish contact details.

And finally, is this the sound of chickens coming home to roost? One of the hopes for the new publication of local government spending is that it will lead to an arm of armchair auditors (though some have their doubts). Eric Pickles publicly praised one group of local activists, despite the fact it was a flagship Tory council that was being ‘audited’ by bloggers including the wonderfully named Mrs Angry.

The government has launched a consultation today on Open Data and how to move forward the transparency agenda by encouraging ‘push’ (pro-active release) and ‘pull’ (stronger rights for access to data). The consultation covers a wide range of areas

Proactive: how to ensure ICTs systems can publish data easily and make pro-active publication a ‘default’ setting

Changing mechanisms: giving the ICO more power, creating a new right to appeal for datasets and limiting internal review times

The paper also contains two interesting annexes on evidence of impact and draft principles.

For a brief summary see here and a discussion thread here. This appears to form part of a further push of the transparency agenda, alongside other initiatives. David Cameron recently said the reforms had now moved to ‘phase two’ from publishing core data to publishing more about public services and how they perform.

‘If our transparency focus over the past 12 months has been to open up core central government data in areas such as spending, our priority over the next year will be to release new data on the performance of public services. This revolution in government transparency will make it easier than ever before for the public to make informed choices between providers and hold government to account for the performance of key public services’.

Starting in January 2013, two years’ worth of classified files will be published each year. This means that by 2023, the records will be only 20 years behind the date of the event rather than 30. The files regarding the human crush at a Sheffield football stadium, in which 96 Liverpool fans died, would have already be published sooner than previously expected – 2016.

But a July 20 Information Commissioner ruling has pegged the date at August 24, 2011, instead – much to the chagrin of the Cabinet Office, which has been contesting the release of files for more than two years.

Commissioner Christopher Graham noted the reduced release time for classified archives when ordering the release. The new rules, however, have not yet gone into effect.

“Although this is not directly relevant here as … the Act continues to define an historical record as 30 or more years old… there is a diminishing case for withholding information over 20 years old,” he said.

The ICO decision concerned a freedom of information request sent by the BBC, asking for correspondence and briefings between Thatcher and her cabinet and the record of a Cabinet meeting dated April 20, 1989, five days after the disaster in Sheffield.

The documents are controversial. Families of the deceased accused Thatcher’s government of covering up the police’s involvement in the crush.

A report showed the South Yorkshire authorities had neglected security procedures at the stadium, but family members of the deceased and the media pushed for more information. They wanted to know what Margaret Thatcher had to say.

“Twenty-two years ago, when Mrs. Thatcher came to Liverpool Cathedral, my husband asked her face-to-face if there was going to be a cover-up, and she said: ‘Mr Joynes, there will be no cover-up.’ But there has been a cover-up which has persisted ever since,” Pat Joynes, who lost her son Nicholas in the tragedy told the BBC.

The BBC request had been refused by the Cabinet Office, and the case was taken to the ICO.

The Cabinet’s main arguments are that the documents fall within the Act’s exemptions on ministerial communications (Article 35 of the FOI Act) and that releasing them would undermine the convention of collective Cabinet responsibility, whereby every cabinet member is responsible for the final policy decision, even if they disagreed with it in private discussions.

“The public authority has argued that disclosure would impact negatively upon the freedom with which Ministers believe they can engage in free and frank discussions with colleagues and upon the maintenance of collective Cabinet responsibility,” the decision stated.

The principle of collective responsibility argues that if ministers don’t have the freedom to discuss matters privately before issuing a joint statement – i.e. their opinions during the discussions are scrutinised before the fact – this will produce a “chilling effect” and damage policy-making.

Though Commissioner agreed the information fit within the parameters of the exemption – which relates to the formulation or development of government policy, Ministerial communications, and the operation of any Ministerial private office – he concluded the exemption did not withstand the test of time.

“The age of the information has a wider significance in that it is necessary to consider how likely the harmful impacts of disclosure predicted by the public authority are given the age of this information. Having considered the information and the wider context this argument would not be sustainable given the passage of time and multiple changes in government since this information was recorded,” he said.

The Cabinet Office has 28 days from the decision to lodge an appeal with the courts, or comply with the order in 35 days.

A veto is also possible, but it has only been used twice – in February 2009 over the cabinet minutes of the 2003 Iraq war, and in December 2009 over the 1997 devolution of Scotland.

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham, who had been appointed in June 2009 said he was concerned that the veto was being used too lightly.

The veto has not been used since 2009, and the Cabinet Office has not given any indication it plans to use it again. Still, the 2009 cases have some similarities to Thatcher’s Hillsborough papers: the three involve cabinet minutes and arguments against disclosure include collective Cabinet responsibility.

You can see a summary of the events and links to related documents in the Constitution Unit’s archive of Monthly Updates for 2009.

FOI activists are being inspired by the UK mySociety site that allows you to publicly request information http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/. According to their blog the site is now responsible for an impressive 14.6 % of all requests to departments of state in the UK and appears to have upset Michael Gove.

A number of group have clubbed together to develop a German equivalent called ‘Ask the State’. It will be interesting to see how this develops given the ‘slow start’ to German FOI compared to the UK. One interesting feature is a device to help ensure journalistic scoops are kept private:

‘A special feature of the web portal designed for NGOs and journalists is that requests will not be made public immediately while a story is being pursued in order to ensure exclusivity’

Just to prevent any EU officials or politicians a smile of schadenfreude, it’s their turn next as ‘Access Info Europe is working with mySociety on development of a European Union level web portal, “Ask the EU”, to be launched on 28 September 2011, International Right to Know Day’. This would join already existing sites and initiatives such as the ‘wobbing’ site that encourages the use of Access to Information legislation across the EU.